Who

Commandos Battle Pack

This expresses itself in inconvenient ways when I am playing games that reward
patience and timing. In grand strategy games, for example, I’ll carefully
marshall my resources, start moving troops into position, and then perhaps six
or seven turns too early I’ll get bored and say to myself “Well, maybe if I
just send all my tanks rushing in I’ll win.” And, of course, I never do.

This is in part why I don’t like the Metal Gear games at all – they are, by
and large, games that reward you for sitting still and doing nothing until
exactly the right moment, and that’s just not my thing. As a reviewer, I make
a conscious effort to not review those sorts of games.

I’ve made an exception to this rule for Commandos Battle Pack for the Mac.
Mostly because, unlike the Metal Gear games, I actually liked it. This
review may contain some minor spoilers. The Battle Pack consists of two games
packaged together: Commandos 2: Men of Courage and Commandos 3: Destination
Berlin. Both games run well on a late-model Powerbook G4.

One of the best things Commandos has going for it is the plot. All men “of a
certain age” will remember a World War II movie called The Dirty Dozen. It’s
been emulated and remade several times. The basic idea is “group of misfits
who are too tough and independent for the regular army take on suicidal
missions and, through stealth, ingenuity, and trickery, triumph. Also, they
kill lots of Nazis along the way.” It’s a fair simplification to simply
describe Commandos as an attempt to make “The Dirty Dozen Computer Game.”
The scenarios are drawn with relish. They deviate from history in noticeable
ways, but always with a wink and a nod.

It’s the fact that the Commandos games are squad-based that justifies them,
in my mind. Your team of stereotypes and misfits covers a broad range of
abilities. The Sapper, for example, handles the explosives, the Thief gets
into hard-to-reach places, while the Green Beret is your man for close combat,
the Driver handles vehicles, the Spy can impersonate enemy officers and
distract sentries, and so on.

The interesting thing about Commandos – I’m going to use the collective to
refer to both games here – is that if you’re not careful you might think it
is a war game. But it isn’t. At its heart, it is a puzzle game, in some ways
not unlike Sokoban or Chromatron. Each mission is basically asking you to
figure out a way to apply your skills to reach your goal without getting
caught. The game isn’t turn-based, but the enemies move in patterns that are
rigid enough that you can treat it like it is. While you can occasionally
survive a firefight, your men are fragile enough that if they are detected,
they’re often dead. It is an odd sort of vibe. If you took away the World War
II window dressing, what you end up with is something that feels like a cross
between Metal Gear and Lemmings.

The first training level provides a good example of what I mean. One way to
win would be to throw some cigarettes near a sentry. When he comes over to
check them out, you knock him on the head, tie him up, and drag him out of
sight. After taking out several other sentries in a similar manner, you have
the thief shimmy up a telephone pole and shimmy on the wire over a minefield,
on the other side of which he’ll grab some wire cutters. Returning back to the
first side, he’ll give the wire cutters to the Sapper, who will cut the barbed
wire around the minefield and then find and retrieve some buried mines. The
Sapper can then place those mines near the entrance to the officers’ bunker,
whistle at the officers, who then run out and blow themselves up.

See what I mean? It’s Lemmings.

But now that we’ve stripped away the WW II exterior, let’s put it back on
again and admire it. The missions throughout both games are plausible,
exciting, and fun. Commandos 2 tends towards longer, more involved missions
than its sequel. Commandos 3 provides more scenarios that let you brute-
force your way through, rather than relying solely on stealth. The motion
capture and animation in both games is arresting, and helps maintain the
suspension of disbelief. The only sour note in the production values is the
voice acting, which is uniformly wince-inducing from start to finish.
Especially the Thief, who has a French accent lifted straight out of Monty
Python and Zee ‘Oly Graaahl.

The gameplay is clever and the puzzles are interesting. Regrettably,
Commandos 2 has a UI that is needlessly baroque. It seems at times that
there is a separate hotkey for every single action in the game. For example, A
readies an attack, unless you want to use your fists, in which case you press
Q. In the example I gave earlier, the Sapper would use the I key to cut the
wires, D to detect mines, click on the mines to retrieve them, and then P to
place mines. If the Sapper wanted to place a satchel charge, he uses the B
key, but to throw a grenade, he’d hit G (but if his friend the Driver wanted
to throw a molotov cocktail, he’d hit S). The keyboard guide
(PDF) is like an
exercise in existential despair. Separate keys for “put on uniform” and “take
off uniform.” Unique keys for eating food and applying first aid, both of
which recover health. And, of course, you just have to remember at any given
time whether you need to click, shift-click, or control-click. When learning
the interface, you can’t help but suspect that you are being made the butt of
a very intricate joke. It feels like you use more keys than when playing a
flight simulator.

In other words, the game was designed with an old-style PC game sensibility.
And although it offends my delicate UI preferences, it really isn’t that bad
while you’re playing. The techniques you use are introduced a few at a time,
and there’s an acceptable in-game glossary to help you navigate. Commandos
3, contrariwise, is designed with a much more mouse-based approach in mind,
and is much easier for new players to navigate. But, if you just can’t live
without having special hotkeys dedicated to “Lipstick” and “Wear Dress” (note:
I’m not kidding), you can set a preference to have Commandos 3 use the
Commandos 2 keyboard map.

The games are strongest when they are outdoors. They use an isometric view
that is manageable in the open, but becomes nearly intolerable once you go
into a building. In this specific respect, between the two games, I actually
think Commandos 2 is the better one. While the UI, as noted, is somewhat
baroque, the game focuses on its strengths. Commandos 3 tries hard to
address the weaknesses of the earlier game, but apart from the UI falls short
of the mark. For example, Commandos 3 has plenty of multi-story houses,
which just makes the indoor scenes that much worse. Instead of fixing the
problems with the earlier engine, your attention is simply drawn to them.

But the interior-space issues aren’t deal-breakers; indeed, the only reason I
noticed them is because the exterior camerawork was so much better. I think
it’s important to focus on what Commandos does well: it takes stealth
gameplay and puts it in a context where it doesn’t seem ridiculous on its
face. And it does so in ways that engage your brain. In a marketplace full of
World War II games that reward you for indiscriminately shooting as much lead
as possible while running and screaming, I think there’s something to be said
for games that take a less-traveled road.

In evaluating the Commandos games, the natural comparison is to compare them
to the Jagged Alliance games, because they are both squad level games. That
comparison is somewhat false. The Jagged Alliance games are really action
games hiding behind a turn-based facade of strategy. The Commandos games are
in fact clever puzzle games hiding behind a facade of real-time combat.

So, all of which leaves you with a simple question: should you buy the game?

I have a reputation, fairly, for being something of a jerk about user
interface issues. I panned Civ IV for example, not just for its abysmal
performance, but also because its user interface didn’t live up to the
requirements of its genre. I’m inclined to give the Commandos games a free
pass for their awkward UI simply because they’re trying to fuse genres in a
novel way.

In the end, I think the deciding factor is whether or not you enjoy stealth
games. As an avowed non-player of stealth games, Commandos held my
interest and provided moments of drama, humor, and intellectual challenge.
That suggests to me that if you already enjoy stealth games, you will overcome
the UI issues to enjoy a depth of gameplay that is missing from other, non-
squad based stealth games. If stealth games aren’t your cup of tea, then I
don’t think Commandos will change your mind about the genre.

Commandos Battle Pack for Macintosh is published by Feral
Interactive and retails for $40 in North
America. Disclosure statement: The publisher graciously provided a copy for
review.